Topic: 2025-Safeguarding and Promoting Traditional Sports and Games
Country: Mexico
Delegate Name: Brady Sievert
2025-Safeguarding and Promoting Traditional Sports and Games
Mexico
Brady Sievert
Mexico has a long and very Rich history of original games and sports from the region. Some of these traditional games often date back to thousands of years, thus making them very unique to the rest of the wider world. But to really keep these games safe from the development of the world, we must take a multifaceted approach to this problem. In order to keep these recreations alive and kept within the records of society, we must take actions to save them, through better government funded education on the subject, more cultural promotion to communities, and community involvement.
Our government should officially recognize these activities as part of Mexico’s cultural heritage, providing legal protections and funding for their preservation. This can be done via incorporating these sports into school curriculum and thus can ensure that younger generations can learn to appreciate them, while local communities and indigenous groups should be encouraged to pass down their traditions rooted in the history of our country. Public awareness through media, social campaigns, and even tournaments can also help keep these games, parts of our heritage, relevant. Additionally, maintaining dedicated spaces such as Ulama/Ōllamaliztli courts or Charrería arenas -traditional Central American games that have existed for thousands of years combined, along with training programs for instructors, can further encourage participation.
Games like that of Ulama and its similar relatives are only still practiced today in only four towns in the state of Sinola, Mexico. This is a tragic and telling message that if we don’t take time to remember the past, then it will inevitably fade away. Data on the UNESCO page only fortifies this fact. However, in collaboration with the National Commission for Physical Culture and Sports (CONADE) and the Mexican Federation of Autochthonous and Traditional Games and Sports (FMJDAT), UNESCO has evaluated joint actions to promote and safeguard traditional sports like Ulama. As aforementioned, It would be necessary to broaden the influence of this genre of sport to the country’s people as an act of preservation of heritage. By bringing together our citizens to preserve our history, it becomes possible to keep our legacy alive and well.
So it should be decided that we must put great importance on the preservation of what we take part in as a collective society, otherwise we’ll forget who we really are. We’ll stop caring about ourselves and will let our identity disappear. But even with our current efforts, we’ve still had difficulty in our mission to preserve our heritage, as today these rituals of our past, have seemingly been all but lost to time, and if we continue on our dangerous path of inaction, they will go extinct.
